Networks and distributed processing systems are of critical importance in business, government and other organizations. The growing trend is towards larger and more complex networks, which support more applications and more users. As these networks grow in size and complexity, the management and control of these networks becomes more difficult.
Current techniques for network management allow for the automatic identification of nodes in a network, the retrieval of information or statistics from each node, and setting or initializing one or more parameters at a node. More recently, policy based network management systems provide a more sophisticated control technique that allows for control policies to be distributed and used for controlling the operation of various network nodes or devices. The COPS (Common Open Policy Service) Protocol, RFC2748, January, 2000 even describes a common protocol to be used to exchange policy information between a policy server and its clients (e.g., devices).
Unfortunately, for policy based network management, the identification and assignment of devices to different device proxies (to receive different control policies) has been largely a manual process, which is unmanageable for larger networks.